Chapter 6 Notes- Perfectly competitive supply: The cost side of the market

-profit- the total revenue a firm receives from the sale of its product minus all costs (explicit and
implicit) incurred in producing it
-Profit = Total Revenue- Total Cost
-Profit = Total Revenue- Variable Cost- Fixed Cost
-profit-maximizing firm – a firm whose primary goal is to maximize the amount of profit it earns
-perfectly competitive markets- markets in which individual firms have no influence over the
market prices of the products they sell
-perfectly competitive firms- can be described as price takers because their inability to influence
market price
-4 characteristics of markets that are perfectly competitive:
-all firms sell the same standardized product
-the market has many buyers and sellers, each of which buys or sells only a small fraction
of the total quantity exchanged.
-productive resources are mobile
-buyers and sellers are well informed
-imperfectly competitive firms- a firm that has at least some control over the market price of its
product
-factor of production- an input used in the production of a good or service
-a firm’s factor of production are employees and the machine(s)
-short run- a period of time sufficiently short that at least some of the firm’s factors of
production are fixed
-long run- a period of time of sufficient length that all the firm’s factors of production are
variable
-law of diminishing returns-a property of the relationship between the amount of a good or
service produced and the amount of a variable factor required to
produce it; it says that when some factors of production are fixed,
increased production of the good eventually requires ever-larger
increases in the variable factor.
-fixed factor of production- an input whose quantity cannot be altered in the short run
-machines
-variable factor of production- an input whose quantity can be altered in the short run
-labor
-variable cost- the sum of all payments made to the firm’s variable factors of production
-total cost- the sum of all payments made to the firm’s fixed and variable factors of production
-marginal cost- as output changes from one level to another, the change in total cost divided by
the corresponding change in output
-short-run shutdown condition- Profit is less than the minimum value of AVC
-P<minimum value of AVC
-average total cost(ATC) – ATC= Total Cost(TC) / total output (Q)
-average variable cost(AVC) – AVC= variable cost (VC)/ total output(Q)
-maximum profit condition- price=marginal cost